I Didn't Plan a Curriculum. I Just Kept Solving Problems.

In spring 2023 I had a spontaneous lung collapse. I spent a week in a hospital bed with a tube in my chest and about two months recovering afterward. At some point during the recovery I opened Coursera and started the Google IT Support certificate. Not because I had a plan. Because I finally had time to sit still and I needed something to work toward.

That's the actual origin of what became a three-year credential arc. Not ambition. A collapsed lung and nowhere to be.

Before that, the resume looks like what it is: someone trying to figure it out. DoorDash with a newborn, my partner and I trading off driving and childcare because that was how we covered both. Pizza delivery before that. Dishwashing. A call center in Riviera Beach where I went from fronter to salesman to managing the junior closer department in about three months, which told me something about how I learn — fast, from inside a problem, by doing it wrong first.

That call center background matters more than it looks. I understand contact center floors from the inside. I know what the manual work actually costs, what breaks first, what nobody has time to fix. When I eventually built automation tools for a dialer operation, I wasn't guessing at the problem. I'd been the person doing the manual version of it.

I finished the Google IT Support cert in January 2024 — five courses, started June 2023, spread across my recovery and the months after. By then I was already in a data and IT role, already writing Python, already shipping things that worked. The cert came after the skill. That pattern repeated.

Google Data Analytics: September 2024 through July 2025. Ten months. While I was building an ETL pipeline that processed 700,000 records in under 8 minutes using pandas vectorization. The cert named what I was already doing.

Google Prompting Essentials: finished February 2026. I'd been using Claude as a design partner for months by then — Director, Pipeline, Agent — a full methodology for AI-assisted development. The cert told me I was doing prompt engineering. Sure.

Google AI Professional: finished today, July 1, 2026. Seven courses. The last three — Writing and Communicating, Content Creation, App Building — I finished this afternoon while waiting for a Cloud Run deployment. I have a 24-tool MCP server that manages my entire YouTube channel from conversation. I have a blog pipeline that publishes to WordPress and Dev.to simultaneously. I have an inbox triage system that classifies 5,000 emails using few-shot learning. Every module felt like reviewing something I'd already built.

Here's what I've learned about how I actually learn: I don't take a course and then apply it. I hit a problem I can't solve, I solve it badly, I solve it less badly, and then at some point I find the credential that puts a name on what I figured out. The cert is not the education. The cert is the signal to other people that the education happened.

That's not a shortcut. It's slower than doing it the right way. There's no professor to tell you when you're wrong, no structure to catch the gaps, no cohort to compare yourself against. You find out you were wrong when the thing breaks in production at 11 PM and you have to figure out why.

But it's the path that was available. No bootcamp, no degree, no runway to spend six months learning before building anything. A GED, a collapsed lung, a newborn, and a lot of late nights.

I'm halfway through Google IT Automation with Python — Course 4 of 7, Module 3, debugging section. It's the most technically grounded cert in the stack and the one I need the least. I've been writing Python automation in production for two years. I'll finish it anyway because the credential matters for what comes next, and because finishing things is a habit worth keeping.

UX Design is queued after that. Google offers a full 8-course certificate — wireframing, prototyping, usability testing, Figma end to end, three portfolio projects. Because I keep hitting the same wall: I know what I want the screen to do and I'm slow to decide how to lay it out. That's a gap. I'll close it.

The direction is becoming clearer in hindsight. IT infrastructure, data, automation, AI, now design. I didn't plan that arc. It's just what the problems kept requiring.

Google IT Support (January 2024) · Google Data Analytics (July 2025) · Google Prompting Essentials (February 2026) · Google AI Professional (July 1, 2026) · Google IT Automation with Python (in progress)

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